Yes, you need a Mods folder and a resource.cfg, just the same as you do for Twallan's mods. Grab this one:

http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php...Setup_and_Files

If it's the same stuff I need for Twallan's things, I've got it. Thanks again! I shall try once more ...

No luck with AwesomeMod either. Sims were destroyed in EIG, but when I tried to save there, it crashed on me again. It doesn't do that usually, I should add. Hm, any ideas anybody? Would be real great!

Just to check, before you entered EIG, did you save the file as another name?

Sorry, I meant EIG not CAW!

Random thought, if Tiinii deletes all Sims in game and then exports the character XML file after doing so and puts that in the world folder in CAW, would that overwrite the original? May be another option to try if the usual ways keep failing.

I've had a lot of issues with prepopulated worlds since the Pets patch- I tried adding pets items to my tropical island, and it'd crash while I tried to build new lots and editing old in EIG, and if not while editing, often on saving-

If I recall right I did try unpopulating via Nraas my old generations version of it to see if that'd fix it and it crashed too... so even with file saved as another name, it could be a borkage in CAW/Patch =/

When I've had time I've been adding new Pets and Pets-families to a savegame of the world to just try the XML for myself- haven't gotten to export test stage yet since got distracted by the other islands.

Thanks for your input guys! It's deeply appreciated.

Simsample, I'm not quite sure if I got this right: Save under a new name BEFORE entering Caw? With which program? I gave the town a new name when I first took it into Caw, after the resource import thing in S3pe. But you don't mean that right?

Bakafox, would the XML file still change if I'm not able to save in EIG? Maybe this is what crashes EIG in the first place, attempting to write this change after deleting the Sims?

I've also tried a couple more things by now, most rather stupid I guess; like exchanging the global layer of this world with another one, failed of course. Then I rummaged through the resources in the world file - I can find all the little snapshots of the Sims and delete them alright, but I cannot for the life of me figure out where the Sims themselves are stored in the resources ... How depressing really ...

if I recall right from XML discussion- you use the worldoutput cheat when in normal/savegame when sure there's only who you want. (You maybe will need to make a dummy family if nothing else). This makes 2 XML files of characters, visible and invisible.

You then just drop those XML files into the world folder in usertooldata before exporting. So if you were making a world called Cheesland, you would put them in (on win pc) my documents/electronic arts/create a world/usertooldata/worlds/cheeseland

Then I think you'd just export that world as per usual, and the XML would be in new world.

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=427961 was the thrad I first saw XML talked about in- is old, but it might be what'll work....

Okay, that was a typo- I really meant, save as a new name before entering EIG. SO I meant to do file> Save as in CAW. Sorry about that!


The character import XML really only assigns relationships, bigraphies, household descriptions and relationships to sims that are already in the world, upon starting a new game in that world. So if you manage to remove the sims correctly, the xml will not do anything, and could be deleted. So I don't think the xml file is the problem here.


Yes, but you have to get the sims into the world in the first place, and we have no way of generating the character import xml anyway (we can generate character export files, but those are totally different and not of much help when creating a character import). So the character import file has to be made by hand, which means that it's probably easier and quicker to use the existing population method.

Anyway, I don't think that discussion is helping Tiinii- it's probably confusing the issue!

Tiinii, do you get an error message when EIG crashes?

Bah, i totally misread/misunderstood how it worked. Sorry, is definitely not applicable then.

Well it's really only functional at world initialization (when you start a new game with the world), but of course it's possible that the xml is somehow causing EIG to crash anyway (since we know that erroneous or superfluous resources can sometimes cause problems), so perhaps it's worthwhile for Tiinii to delete that, as well as those SNAP files.

So it was a good suggestion!

Well, I get no error message from EIG itself, only Windows telling me the program was not responding anymore. The weirdest thing is, as others also noticed: Caw still remembers at least some of the changes made in EIG even if it crashed before saving. Right now, I tried a new route: Took town into EIG, evicted and deleted 1 Family via the clipboard, then bulldozed and deleted their former lot as well. I thought maybe something in the lot is sort of holding on to the family. Well, EIG crashed once more, but in Caw, the lot was gone nevertheless - unfortunately with those little buggers standing right where the lot had been ... So, lot gone, family still there.
I then found the game objects that make up this family in Caw, moved them from global to another layer and deleted them there. Guess what? Caw crashes when trying to save after that, with this cryptic "writing in protected memory" message. Waaaaaa ... !!! Now the whole world file and its backups are broken once more. Sigh.
It's so weird, there must be something else, besides the Sims objects and the lot, that remembers/stores them and then causes those crashes when trying to reference them. But what? *scratches head*

When you get a "writing in protected memory" error, that can often tell you that there is some error in the world, and that the program cannot compute the save file, so tries to grab extra memory to help it cope. You gave it a nervous breakdown, in other words!

I think this is just one of those things with user populated worlds- it is very difficult to remove the sims from those, I'm not sure if anyone has succeeded yet. See around post # 135 of this thread. There seems to be something about the way they are imported that means Awesome and Twallan's mods cannot cleanly remove the sims, so that traces remain causing save errors.

Thanks again for the comments! I've given up on that particular neighborhood for now, and when I started on another one, also pre-populated, actually I had no problems at all. EIG did crash when I kicked out Sims, but before it did, CAW always managed a save and everything worked out absolutely fine. I guess it must have been something in this other world that made everything come crashing down around my ears ;-)

Thankyou SimSample once again a very useful post.

In the second method you say to rebuild routing data then save under a new name. What does that mean rebuild routing data?

abreen28, there's an entry in the View Menu I think, called 'rebuild routing data'. Just klick on that, sometimes you'll have to wait a little for the process to finish. You can also view the routing data, the entry's right above the other one.

Hello,

I'm currently in the process of editing twinbrook to add all the late night bars & other community things (because there was not enough space to add them in the first place)

so here's what I did :
-I sucessfully used method 1 to open twinbrook in CAW http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=447707
except I didn't remove said WPID & UNKN since my intent is to replace the original twinbrook

-I added some roads, flattened some terrain , checked simrouting, added empty lots, opened EIG, and populated them with those community buildings.
-exit EIG, repainted the ground
of course I saved the world a lot when I did those things

-went to export the thing : failed to export !
I tried several things already :
-naming the new lots (yeah forgot to do that, and thought I would do it later while in game)
-saving under a new folder/new name
-export right after opening CAW (without opening world that is)
-export the oldest backup
-clear worldbuildercaches & subfolder worldcaches
-renamed my deactivated mods folder & used "destroyallhumans"

none of those worked

this is my first CAW project and I don't understand what I did wrong at all

edit:
hum I wonder if I could open up the original twinbrook (well rather a copy of it) with S3PE & import my work in progress world in it...
however I wonder about what to do about ".lot" files & layers kept in subfolders...

edit2: I think I should import the content of lot files in the final world file since it is what I see in the original twinbrook !
edit3: same thing with layers

doesn't work either
I guess I did something wrong somewhere ... pffff

Please do not multipost. If you have something to add and no-one's posted in between, edit your latest post. Thank you.

For your problem, please be patient. If someone has an answer they will give it to you when they read this forum.

Sorry, different forums different rules, sometimes "multipost" is tolerated or even "enforced" when a certain amount of time separates them...
as a long time member I didn't reread rules recently

I'm not impatient, I was just adding content as I test things out and to tell you the truth I don't have much hope to fix this anymore.
thanks for merging my posts.

Whismerhill, did you rename the world and give it a new thumbnail and description?

hum no
I thought, I shouldn't do that since it's purpose is to be a replacement

The problem with that though is that the names for the EA worlds are stored as a reference, as the strings for world name, description, lot names, sim names etc., are stored elsewhere in STBL files.

So if you look at your world name it will be something like 'World/EP02/Twinbrook/WorldDescription:Name'.

We know that CAW cannot handle names that have any other characters than alphanumeric, so for example 'WorldV1.2' will not work, nor will 'simsample's world' or 'World/Version 1'.

So you need to put in a name and description, and re-link the thumbnail in order to get the world to export. You can always re-import the originals in an attempt to make a default replacement if you need to (although I've never heard of anyone trying this). That would mean installing the world, and editing the installed world file. The resources that hold that information are as follows:
WDDT: 0x0668F638- Contains world description.
WPID: 0xF609FD60- identifies world (won't be changed unless you have deleted the original, though)
TWNI: 0x0668F639- contains world thumbnail
TWNP: 0x0668F639- gives file path for location of TWNI
WDNM: 0xD9BD0909- World Name

ok thanks a lot for this detailed description, it works !

just for reference :
- first I deleted WPID with S3PE then replaced name, description & chose PNG with CAW => export successful
- so I tried not removing WPID but still replacing name, description & PNG => export successful
- then I tried with another world which still had original twinbrook population, still not touching WPID but replacing name, description & PNG => export successful ! woohoo

this final one I installed successfully & tried playing a new savegame on it => seems ok

now I have a bunch of other stuff to do:
-adding back files lost in the process
to know which files were lost by caw, I imported the original twinbrook in a new world again then immediately "saved as" reload, input name/desc/PNG, export, install, take back world file & unpack content with S3PE. Then I used winmerge

In the process I saw that this procedure modifies a lot of files although CAW did nothing but open & save ...

-finally I'll try to replace the original twinbrook with it. your explanation of tags will be immensely useful !

edit: seems like there is a key file already in my "wip twinbrook file", okay I'll leave this file alone
there's also an xml file , however the content is completely different, I think I'll delete this one & import the original (which contains all the sim data it seems)

The _KEY file is a texture database; it is changed when you save because the original contains file paths relating to the EA development machines, and the texture file location does not exist on your computer.

The _INI files are for the weather (fog, clouds, sky and water colour) and we know that CAW discards those upon saving. The same goes for the _XML file; that is used to set up relationships and skills for the sims. CAW is designed to import these files upon package export, and will not save them in the world file. See these threads for more info:
http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=466283
http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=459198

The other two UNKN files I'm not familiar with, and though one of them is listed in the packed file list, there is no related information:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...PackedFileTypes
One is only a few bytes but the other is much larger, it's likely that either CAW is discarding these files or perhaps they are being edited, as the water plane resources are upon saving.

OMG it works lol
can't believe it
I replaced the original twinbrook, started a new game, played a couple of minutes with a town sim & it seems to be ok, sim had money/job/friends ...
also I directly imported the ini files with S3PE in the final world file & it fixed the fog.
of course I need more time to test things out

a small glitch though, In CAW I added an asphalt terrain paint that I took in bridgeport (01_DXT1_asphalt.dds) & painted some terrain with it
and well it seems to have been replaced by standard yellow grass, checked the key file (I kept my modified key file) and the dds seems in there, and the dds is also in the world file...
the weird part is that when I'm at maximum zoom out it's showing asphalt as it should, only when I zoom in does the asphalt transform back to yellow grass
something to do with mipmaps I guess or caches but I deleted them already ...

ho well I didn't find anything yet on this issue (except the one about brown terrain everywhere, but that doesn't seem related to my particular problem),
I'll keep searching tomorrow. good night. and thanks a lot again simsample